RETURNING FROM SAN FRANCISCO, MARILYN moved into a three-room, first-floor apartment at 882 North Doheny Drive between Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. It was small but charming. The living room featured wall-to-wall white carpeting, a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a working fireplace, and the same white baby grand piano she’d been given by her mother as a child. She installed customized shelves in the living room and bedroom to accommodate her collection of books and phonograph records. She divided the third room into a wardrobe closet and office with an exercise corner that contained weights and a yoga mat. There was a television set and a seven-foot sofa in the living room where Joe spent much of his time, smoking cigarettes and watching his favorite shows. He helped her move in. He and Joey were her first dinner guests in the new apartment. As Joey recalled, “Marilyn insisted on making lasagna using a recipe and step-by-step instructions provided by Aunt Marie, my father’s sister. Evidently something went terribly wrong. The finished dish looked like an afterbirth, all red and gory. I don’t think my father cared. He smiled and took us all out to a restaurant for dinner. Marilyn later learned how to prepare spaghetti and spaghetti sauce, and on weekends she’d sometimes make breakfast for my father. She also learned a few words and phrases in Italian. But that was about it.”
Hardly disturbed by Marilyn’s lack of culinary skill, DiMaggio’s main concern had to do with the disorder in the apartment and Marilyn’s unwillingness to clean up after herself. He telephoned George Solotaire in New York and complained that the place had begun to resemble the backseat of Marilyn’s car. Every stick of furniture in the apartment was covered with discarded items of clothing. Old newspapers and magazines sat in a heap on the kitchen table. The kitchen counters were coated with old coffee and food stains. Dirty dishes were stacked high in the sink. Empty bottles and cans littered the bedroom floor, along with clumps of used tissue paper and an assortment of forks, knives, and spoons. The bathroom was no better. In San Francisco, Marie tidied up after Marilyn, but there was nobody around to clean up after her in Beverly Hills. Joe DiMaggio, fastidious to an almost annoying degree, began buying paper plates and cups to counter the dirty dish situation. When that solution failed, he fled to the Knickerbocker Hotel and spent his nights there.
George Solotaire suggested that Joe hire a housekeeper twice a week to deal with Marilyn’s apartment. Joe hesitated. He didn’t think she’d give a stranger access to her residence. “The truth of the matter,” said Robert Solotaire, “is that Joe happened to be one of the most impecunious fellows you’d ever want to meet. He made up all sorts of excuses why he couldn’t spring for a maid, which, by the way, would’ve been a lot less expensive than staying at the Knickerbocker. But that’s Joe DiMaggio for you. He was cheap, probably the result of growing up during the Depression in a household with little money to spare for extras. Just how cheap was he? If you went to a restaurant with him and there were leftovers on the plate, he’d take them home in a doggy bag—not only his leftovers but yours as well. Now, that’s cheap. And don’t forget, this is a guy who was getting paid a hundred thousand bucks a year to hit a baseball when the average player made far less. He had plenty of cash, and he almost never picked up his own tab; somebody was always treating him to dinner and drinks. As for Marilyn’s apartment, he temporarily solved the problem by buying a vacuum cleaner and employing a college coed to go over there once a week and tidy up. The coed lasted less than a month, because after she put everything away, Marilyn couldn’t find anything. One item that disappeared was a photograph she had of her half sister Berniece with Mona Rae, Berniece’s young daughter. Marilyn blamed the student for the photo’s disappearance and fired her. Joe finally hired a commercial cleaning outfit to do their thing. He then called a domestic employment service and found a housekeeper who kept the place reasonably clean.”
Whereas Joe DiMaggio could be criticized for having been thrifty, one of Marilyn Monroe’s most prevalent traits had to be her unceasing generosity. She perpetually doled out more money than she managed to bring in, and, as a result, constantly found herself in the red. Besides her usual array of expenses, she now had to pay for her mother’s maintenance and upkeep at Rockhaven, the posh private facility where she would remain for years to come. A more recently acquired expense was Grace Goddard, who had left Doc Goddard and returned to Los Angeles. By now an unemployed (and unemployable) alcoholic with an addiction to pain medication and sleeping pills, Grace turned to Marilyn for help. Feeling sorry for her former guardian, Marilyn hired her to perform minor secretarial chores. Before the end of the year, learning that she had uterine cancer and only a few months to live, Grace killed herself by overdosing on barbiturates. It was Marilyn who made and paid for the funeral arrangements. Grace was buried at Westwood Memorial Park, a spot in the middle of Los Angeles chosen by Marilyn because of its “beauty and serenity.” The ashes of Ana Lower had been interred in the same cemetery in 1948. Marilyn told Joe DiMaggio that when she died, she, too, wanted to be buried there. It comforted her to think of Westwood Memorial as her final resting place. In Joe DiMaggio Jr.’s presence, his father said to Marilyn, “You’re much too young to be so preoccupied with death. You’ve got a whole life ahead of you.”
• • •
Joe DiMaggio’s aggressive attitude toward Natasha Lytess, Marilyn’s drama coach, grew in intensity after Twentieth Century–Fox dropped Lytess from its payroll, placing the responsibility for her salary entirely in Monroe’s hands. “That’s why you never have any money to spend on yourself,” DiMaggio berated the actress. Joe wasn’t the only Lytess detractor. Allan “Whitey” Snyder, in charge of Marilyn’s makeup at Twentieth Century–Fox, thought little of MM’s drama coach and said as much. Monroe soon reduced Natasha’s salary. Without notifying Lytess, she’d begun studying with Michael Chekhov, the Russian-born nephew of the famous playwright Anton Chekhov. Although Marilyn frustrated Chekhov with her habitual lateness, he acknowledged her talent and suggested she’d make a good Grushenka in a film version of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a role that continued to fascinate Marilyn for the rest of her life. She told Chekov, who’d been a student of Stanislavski, the father of Method acting, that she “wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak.” She didn’t “want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. It was all right for the first few years, but now I’m different.”
If Marilyn hoped to change her image, it wasn’t evident from the Photoplay magazine awards ceremony in 1953. Wedged into a skintight, tissue-thin gold lamé gown originally designed for Marilyn to wear in a scene that was ultimately cut from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn stole the spotlight from every other reigning Hollywood star in attendance that night. The “scandalous” gown, coupled with the patented Monroe walk, created a backlash of public condemnation. Joan Crawford, for one, announced in the press that Marilyn “must have mistaken the award ceremony for a burlesque show.” One of Marilyn’s few defenders was Betty Grable, a former Twentieth Century–Fox glamour queen well known for her World War II derrière pinup shot. Interviewed by a reporter, Grable accurately assessed Marilyn’s key contribution to the world of cinema: “Why, Marilyn’s the biggest thing that’s happened in Hollywood in years. The movies were just sort of moving along, and all of a sudden, zowie, there was Marilyn. She’s a shot in the arm for Hollywood.”
Betty Grable had been cast opposite Marilyn—and Lauren Bacall—in How to Marry a Millionaire, which began shooting that April. Based on a bestselling 1951 novel by Doris Lilly, the movie follows the fortunes of three women who rent an expensive New York apartment and scheme to find themselves a trio of millionaire husbands. Doris Lilly met Monroe for the first time just after the Photoplay scandal had run its course and a week before shooting got underway on How to Marry a Millionaire.
“Famous Artists agent Charles Feldman joined us for lunch at the Café de Paris, Fox’s commissary,” recalled Doris. “I’d known Charlie for ages. He had a violent crush on Marilyn. They’d had a tryst several years before, but Marilyn had abruptly called it off. Charlie had great intuition. As early as 1950, he told me he knew this young actress named Marilyn Monroe and that she had superstar written all over her. He said she was shrewd, had good instincts, and knew how to create publicity for herself. He eventually became her agent, or at least one of them. At first he assigned her to Hugh French at Famous Artists, but then took her on himself. What I remember about my first meeting with Marilyn is that the commissary was jammed with all sorts of stars—Charlton Heston, Rita Hayworth, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, among others—and as soon as Marilyn walked in, they stopped eating and started staring, their forks frozen in midair. All motion ceased.
“The next day, I saw her at a Fox cocktail party. The studio bigwigs were all there, including Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, as well as the usual complement of Hollywood lawyers, press agents, talent scouts, publicists, journalists, what have you. And when Marilyn appeared, the place went stone dead. Everyone gaped. The center of the room cleared as she walked through. It was like the parting of the Red Sea, the same reaction she’d inspired the day before in the commissary. Considering her youth, it all seemed rather amazing.”
During the making of the film, which was shot in Hollywood and New York, Doris spent a considerable amount of time with Marilyn and came to know her well despite Monroe’s forever shifting moods and personality changes. “I’m not the first person to point out that Marilyn was a highly complex individual,” noted Doris. “She could tell you a very revealing story about herself in the morning, and in the afternoon she’d relate the same story but with completely altered details. You never got the same story twice. In other words, the earth was forever shifting under her feet—and yours, if you were in her company. There was a mercurial quality to her sensibility that made it impossible to pin Marilyn down.”
According to Doris, Joe DiMaggio marched to his own drummer. “He was carved of granite and never changed. He was set in his ways. That’s not to say he wasn’t an intriguing man. He was intriguing because he revealed so little of himself. Marilyn told you everything, and DiMaggio told you nothing, but ultimately they were both hieroglyphics. It was difficult, if not impossible, to read either one of them.”
DiMaggio came and went during the filming of How to Marry a Millionaire, leaving Los Angeles on junkets to New York and Chicago, on business trips to San Francisco. Doris Lilly remembered that he visited the set only once. He stood in the back, hidden in the shadows, watching Marilyn like a hawk. Afterward they engaged in a loud argument in her dressing room. He felt her outfits in the film were far too revealing. Marilyn told Doris he’d voiced the same objection on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It seemed to Doris Lilly as if Joe wanted to put Marilyn in a birdcage, to possess her, and the more he tried to curtail her freedom, the more she rebelled. He resented anyone he perceived as standing in the way of his relationship with her. One name on his enemies list was that of Natasha Lytess. Natasha was at Marilyn’s side every night helping her rehearse her lines for the following day’s shoot. Doris Lilly happened to be at Marilyn’s Doheny Drive residence when DiMaggio confronted Lytess and said to her, “Why don’t you find yourself another victim—haven’t you stolen enough of Marilyn’s money?” On a separate occasion when Lytess called the actress, he picked up the phone and told her, “If you wish to speak to Miss Monroe, contact her agent—don’t call here.”
Natasha Lytess told Doris Lilly that Marilyn needed her as a coach and that the actress lacked the confidence to “stand up” to DiMaggio. Joe countered Natasha’s argument by pointing out that Marilyn didn’t have enough faith in her own convictions and depended too heavily on coaches and would-be friends, anyone willing to offer advice of any kind. Doris more or less shared DiMaggio’s view, attributing many of Monroe’s difficulties on the set to her lack of discipline. She consistently showed up late for shooting, upsetting the director, the producer, and everyone else associated with the film. “They’d start shooting at eight in the morning,” said Lilly, “and Marilyn would be at home sitting in her bathtub or getting dressed and applying makeup. And half the time she didn’t have her lines memorized. One of the problems was that she couldn’t sleep at night. She started taking sedatives, and we all know how that turned out. She became addicted and she began drinking, and the combination of alcohol and pharmaceuticals screwed her up. She never appeared in a film after How to Marry a Millionaire that finished shooting on schedule. It wasn’t just her tardiness. It was also that she insisted on retake after retake. Each scene had to be shot over and over again. What saved her is that she had that ‘certain something’ that God gave her—it’s what made her a star. Whatever it was, you had to adore her for it.”
Above all, Marilyn was a free spirit, unrestrained by the conventions that dictate the behavioral patterns of so many others in her profession, especially those whose careers were inextricably tied to the studio system. “I’d never met anyone like her before,” said Whitey Snyder, “and I knew almost all of Fox’s leading female players. Long after she became an established star, she’d do things like jog to the Fox studio along Santa Monica Boulevard in a pair of baggy jeans, a scarf tied around her hair, and her face smeared with cold cream to prevent wrinkles. ‘I don’t know,’ she’d joke, ‘nobody stops for me. I can’t get a ride.’ She was quite the character. Add this to her acting, her beauty, her being, her story, and her legacy, and you have the Hollywood immortal that she eventually became.”
In April Joe DiMaggio met in New York with Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. To Joe’s surprise, O’Malley offered him a contract to become manager of the team. O’Malley reasoned that with his super-celebrity status, DiMaggio would help draw fans to the ballpark. Joe declined the offer. He didn’t want to be associated with another baseball organization located in the same city as the Yanks. He also wanted to spend more time with Marilyn, and becoming a manager would be more than an all-encompassing commitment. He had signed on to become West Coast vice president in charge of public relations for the Buitoni company, a fancy title that paid well but demanded little of his time. Essentially, he served as a greeter at the company’s twice-annual national sales conference, with a few other mundane duties thrown in for good measure.
“While in New York or wherever else he had to be,” said Doris Lilly, “DiMaggio called Marilyn ten times a day. He demanded to know what she was doing and whom she was seeing. He didn’t trust her, and probably for good cause. There were always men around yearning to get into her panties, which she purportedly didn’t wear. And many of them succeeded. I know for a fact that while DiMaggio was courting Marilyn, she was playing the field with men like Mel Tormé, Eddie Robinson Jr., Nico Minardos, Elia Kazan, and Twentieth Century–Fox fashion designer Billy Travilla. There were others as well, especially earlier in her career, pre–Joe DiMaggio, when men were constantly propositioning her, promising to put her in their films in exchange for a roll in the hay. According to Charlie Feldman, Marilyn had been pregnant on more than a few occasions and had undergone a number of abortions and miscarriages. “Over the years, I’ve read various psychological exposés exploring the reasons behind Marilyn’s promiscuity. One book suggested she sought self-respect through the men she was able to attract and that she usually went with men she could look up to. Another book attributed her hypersexuality to her lifelong search for a father figure. A third said she bedded so many men because they afforded her a sense of completion, filling a void that had been with her since childhood. To my mind, all that analytic theorizing is nothing more than a lot of swill. The truth of the matter is that Marilyn just happened to have a healthy appetite for sex, maybe not with everyone, certainly not with the old oxen she slept with in order to advance her career, but in general it seems to have given her great pleasure. She wasn’t at all uptight when it came to sex. I mention this because of something she said to me. ‘There are times,’ she observed, ‘when all a girl wants and needs is a nice big stiff cock, no more and no less.’ ”
This is not to suggest that Marilyn couldn’t differentiate between love and lust, desire and fulfillment. Although she claimed to enjoy her intimate encounters with Joe DiMaggio, she told Shelley Winters that she couldn’t achieve a climax with him. “That’s something very few men can seem to give me,” she said. “Porfirio Rubirosa [the swarthy Dominican playboy] went at me all night, but even he didn’t succeed. The only climax I usually get is the one I give myself.” Marilyn confided in Truman Capote that DiMaggio was able to satisfy her orally. Whatever the extent of her fulfillment with him, it’s clear that the sexual attraction between them provided a powerful link. She compared the perfection of his body to Michelangelo’s David. He thought hers was, as he once told George Solotaire, “something only God could create.”
Nevertheless one of the “few men” able to completely satisfy Marilyn sexually, an unlikely candidate at that, was Wall Street tycoon Paul Shields, whose stepdaughter “Rocky” had married actor Gary Cooper. Shields, born in 1889, had turned sixty-four by the time he met Marilyn in New York in 1953 at a birthday party for columnist Walter Winchell. He saw her again in Los Angeles during a period when Joe DiMaggio had meetings in his hometown in conjunction with the founding of the Fisherman’s National Bank of San Francisco, a project that never quite materialized.
In 1955 Marilyn told Truman Capote about her “two-night stand” with Shields, who had a well-deserved reputation in Hollywood as a bon vivant. A wealthy man (he owned a yacht and a private plane), Shields sat on the boards of a half dozen banks and, as Capote acknowledged, “probably busted up more marriages than Casanova. Marilyn went with him because she knew of his reputation. She wasn’t disappointed. She couldn’t believe that a man his age could be so energetic and accomplished. She proclaimed him the best lover she’d ever had. Of course, she made the same declaration regarding Joe DiMaggio. So who’s to say?”
Joe, meanwhile, indulged in his own abbreviated sexual interlude, probably the only one he had during his courtship of Marilyn. Ironically, it took place at nearly the same time as Marilyn’s fling with Frank Shields. Amy Lipps (not her real name), a twenty-two-year-old graduate student from Ocean Grove, New Jersey, had flown to San Francisco to spend a few days with an older brother then residing in Northern California. In the course of her visit, Amy, who, uncoincidentally, bore a striking resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, happened to meet Joe DiMaggio.
Recalling the episode, Lipps said she and her brother had spent the afternoon sightseeing in San Francisco and wound up eating dinner at the DiMaggio-owned family restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. “Growing up in New Jersey,” she remarked, “my brother had always loved the Yankees, so when Joe DiMaggio came over to our table and introduced himself, my brother nearly fell off his chair. I wasn’t into baseball, and although I’d heard of Joe DiMaggio, I knew very little about him. He seemed cordial enough. He said the way I looked reminded him of film actress Marilyn Monroe, which is something I’d been told numerous times. One thing led to another, and my brother and I spent the rest of the night barhopping with Joe, listening to him reminisce about his days as a ballplayer. At the end of the evening, he asked if he could see me again the following day and take me to dinner. My brother didn’t seem to mind, so I agreed to meet him. The dinner turned out to be at his house near the restaurant. We had a lot to drink, and I ended up spending the night. He was a good lover—very determined, and he took his time. In the morning, he asked if I could stay a day longer, but I’d already booked my return flight. We exchanged a few telephone calls, but then my brother called from California to tell me he’d seen a news item as to how Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were considering marriage. I wrote Joe and asked him to explain himself. I never heard back. Until my brother called, I had no idea Joe and Marilyn were involved. He’d mentioned her, but only in passing. I suppose it explains why he was attracted to me.”
• • •
On May 30, 1953, Memorial Day, an event took place that would play an instrumental role in the DiMaggio-Monroe relationship. While fishing by himself at Bodega Bay, a shallow, rocky inlet of the Pacific Ocean an hour north of San Francisco, Michael Frank DiMaggio drowned. His body was found floating alongside his fishing boat, a hundred yards from shore. He was forty-five, six years older than Joe. Like his father, Michael was short but stocky, with muscular arms and legs. Although no autopsy was performed, a police report filed by local officials indicated that he might have suffered a heart attack before hitting his head against the side of the vessel and plummeting unconscious into the sea.
Joe was vacationing in Mexico when the accident occurred. His sister Marie reached him by telephone, and he made immediate plans to return to San Francisco. He called Marilyn in Los Angeles, where she was about to celebrate her twenty-seventh birthday with Bebe Goddard. Marilyn flew north the following day and joined Joe at his Beach Street home. The house became a virtual funeral parlor, with waves of friends and family drifting in and out, speaking Sicilian Italian and broken English, smoking Italian stogies, and drinking homemade Italian wine. Of the immediate family, nobody took Mike’s death harder than Joe. Overnight he seemed to age twenty years. He couldn’t sleep, nor could he hold down his food. Marilyn hadn’t seen the vulnerable side of Joe before. In her eyes, his weakness became his strength. She consoled him. It was almost a reversal of roles. His family members looked on as she sat in his lap, her arms around his shoulders, her head nestled gently against the side of his face. The certitude and self-assuredness he’d demonstrated since meeting Marilyn had for now been replaced by self-doubt and indecision. When she returned home to North Doheny Drive, Joe went with her. He gave her a belated and unlikely birthday present: a set of golf clubs. He told her that Mike had been a great golfer, and had he wanted to play baseball, he would’ve been better than the three brothers who did play the game. Marilyn felt touched. For the first time, she began to take seriously his offer, which he’d made more than once, that they get married.
Joe Jr. and his friend George Millman, the son of Mort Millman, Dorothy Arnold’s agent, met Joe and Marilyn at the airport in a limousine when they returned from San Francisco. George, three years older than Joey, observed that the relationship between Marilyn and Joe Jr. seemed “extremely warm and affectionate. They were unusually close. Joey and his father, however, didn’t get along. They didn’t understand each other.” Yet, as Millman recalled, when Joe and Marilyn arrived in Los Angeles from San Francisco following the death of DiMaggio’s brother, Joe appeared to have changed. He seemed to have softened. It was as if a wall had come down.
Their reconciliation, if it can be called that, didn’t last long. Within a week or two, the wall went back up. DiMaggio returned to his old form, constantly criticizing Joey. Nothing Joe Jr. did measured up to his father’s high standards. He wasn’t tall enough or strong enough or aggressive enough. He was ten pounds overweight, which in his father’s eyes made him “fat.” Encouraged by Marilyn, Joey had begun to lift weights. Joe insisted he wasn’t lifting enough weight to make a difference. “DiMaggio men are always muscular,” Joe chided his son. “So get with the program.”
In mid-June Joey went off to summer camp on Catalina Island. As he’d done many times before, he had to shoulder the burden that came with having a family name like DiMaggio. Ned Wynn, grandson of the comedic actor Ed Wynn, attended the same camp and remembered Joey as “a roly-poly kid . . . who was expected to be the best softball player of all the campers, but because he was only average, he was razzed. Even though I was supposed to be his friend, I found myself standing on the sidelines razzing him with the rest of the campers.”
“As a teenager,” said Joe Jr., “you never become entirely inured to that kind of treatment, though I’d certainly experienced enough of it—having my belongings stolen, being pushed and and poked whenever I stood on a line, being heckled and jeered and laughed at. Kids can be very cruel. This is the kind of stuff that went on in camp all the time. It helped that Marilyn wrote to me and sent care packages filled with candy, cookies, cashews, and paperback books. ‘I’d send you comic books,’ she wrote, ‘but I don’t want you to read junk. It’s bad enough your father’s addicted to them.’ ”
Joe DiMaggio likewise sent his son a care package that summer. It consisted of a deck of cards, a copy of Lucky to Be a Yankee, his 1946 “autobiography” (prepared with the help of a ghostwriter), a new baseball mitt, and a published guide to the martial arts that he’d inscribed, “To Joey, Don’t let anyone ever pick on you. Love, Dad.”
In the summer of 1953, Doris Lilly telephoned Marilyn from New York to find out how things were going with Joe DiMaggio and to say she’d seen a recent cover story on Monroe in Cosmopolitan magazine and another by Bennett Cerf in Esquire. Marilyn told Doris that Joe “was up to his old tricks.” He’d sneered condescendingly at the Cosmo and Esquire articles because neither magazine had paid Marilyn. “Where’s the money?’ he’d asked her. He said the same thing every time a periodical ran a profile of her. He even called Harry Brand, publicity director at Fox, and asked him why Marilyn never got paid for these articles, and Brand had patiently explained that it simply didn’t work like that. And then, in addition, Joe continued to harp on Marilyn’s attire. Her blouses were too tight and her dresses too revealing. Where were all the clothes he’d bought for her? But the biggest bone of contention between them involved the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case.
The Rosenbergs had been put to death on June 19 because they’d been convicted of slipping the Soviets top-secret documents related to the construction of the atomic bomb. It was that whole Red Scare–Cold War controversy. The Rosenbergs had two small boys. Marilyn didn’t believe Ethel Rosenberg had a hand in it or that Julius Rosenberg had access to the kind of information the government claimed he did. “What he gave the Russians,” she said, “wasn’t enough to build a firecracker, no less an atomic bomb.” By contrast, Joe DiMaggio couldn’t stop fuming about “those two goddamn commie pinkos. They should’ve chopped off their arms and legs and put their corpses on display at Yankee Stadium for the whole world to see what we do to spies and traitors.”
The Yankee Clipper’s bullying tactics and volatile nature came in handy that August when Marilyn found herself on location at Jasper National Park in Banff, Canada, immersed in the shooting of a contrived, cliché-ridden Western, River of No Return, costarring Robert Mitchum, whom she’d known casually while involved with Jim Dougherty. From the start, the film was fraught with personality conflicts, particularly between Marilyn Monroe and Otto Preminger, the notoriously controlling and surly director, quoted by Hedda Hopper as saying, “Directing Marilyn Monroe is like directing a dog. You need fourteen takes to get the desired results.” When Marilyn read the quote, she cried.
Marilyn intensely disliked both Otto Preminger and her role as a guitar-strumming frontier dance-hall girl. Preminger found little to admire about Monroe and felt the film failed to measure up to his talents. Most annoying for the director was the presence of Natasha Lytess, whom Preminger tried, unsuccessfully, to have banned from the set. Monroe’s contract stipulated that Lytess was to have the right of “approval” for every take that involved Marilyn. Unable to rid himself of the drama coach, Preminger took out his hostility on Marilyn, subjecting her to angry tirades and loud outbursts. Talking to Whitey Snyder (who was on the set with his wife, Twentieth Century–Fox wardrobe chief Marjorie Plecher), Marilyn referred to Preminger as an “insufferable ass” and said he belonged in a stable. Preminger called Marilyn “a big-bosomed pain in the butt.” As for Natasha Lytess, Preminger dubbed her “an absolute know-nothing. The only thing she’s taught Monroe is that lips-apart, eyes-half-shut facial expression, which is supposed to connote sexiness but which to me looks like a half-assed imitation of Greta Garbo.”
That was the least of it. Preminger terrorized Marilyn to total immobility. She became convinced that Preminger didn’t want her in the picture and would do or say anything to get rid of her. She later told Shelley Winters that he began using obscene language, implying that she lacked talent, and the only reason she’d been suggested for the film was that she’d “sucked and fucked” half the executives at Fox. It reached the point where Marilyn became convinced that Preminger planned to do away with her while she was going over some rapids on a raft. Usually stunt men and women performed these dangerous action shots at the end of the picture, but Preminger decided to do them at the beginning using the actors themselves. Marilyn became suspicious.
One morning Marilyn slipped on a pier and tore a ligament in her left leg. She claimed she couldn’t walk. Filming had to be suspended. Marilyn called Joe DiMaggio in New York, and the next day he arrived in Banff, accompanied by George Solotaire. Not knowing Monroe had invited DiMaggio, Whitey Snyder thought he’d come ostensibly to keep an eye on Marilyn and the handsome Robert Mitchum. However, he soon realized that Joe’s purpose for being there, aside from spending time with the girl he loved, was to keep Otto Preminger in check and to stop him from continuing his abusive verbal attacks on Marilyn. Indeed, after DiMaggio’s arrival, Preminger calmed down and ceased his public remonstrations against the actress.
Doctors placed Marilyn’s injured leg in a walking cast, gave her a cane, a pair of crutches, and a wheelchair. DiMaggio became her health attendant, squiring her from their bungalow to medical offices and whisking her by waiting photographers. Marilyn convinced him to pose with her for a camera crew from Look magazine. After she recovered sufficiently to go back to work, DiMaggio and Solotaire spent their days fishing for salmon, canoeing, and golfing. Joe steered clear of Natasha Lytess, but he befriended eleven-year-old Tommy Rettig, a child actor in the film. Initially, Rettig, who later found fame playing Timmy on the television series Lassie, avoided Marilyn off the set (allegedly warned to keep away from her by his priest), but he couldn’t resist the urge to meet DiMaggio, and relations with Marilyn improved gradually. When the entire cast and crew moved from the bungalows they’d inhabited in Jasper National Park to the Mount Royal Hotel in Banff, Joe, George, Marilyn, and Robert Mitchum became permanent fixtures in the card room playing board games and gin rummy. When the picture ended, and Joe and Marilyn got back to Los Angeles, they occasionally socialized with Mitchum and his wife. Mitchum was one of the few Hollywood actors DiMaggio appeared not to resent. Mitchum, in turn, a true baseball fiend, held DiMaggio in high esteem. As for Marilyn, he termed her a “kind of child-woman, but a delightful one at that.”
Whitey Snyder admired Joe DiMaggio as well and felt he was good for Marilyn. “My wife and I always had great affection for both Joe and Marilyn,” said Whitey. “Marilyn was enormously giving. I recall when somebody at Fox, a worker, needed money for an operation to save his kid’s eyesight, she immediately wrote a check for $1,000 and handed it to him. She always supported the underdog. Joe saw past her glittering façade and appreciated her for her fine inner qualities, which wasn’t the case with most of the men she knew. He could be difficult at times. He felt people exploited her and that she was gullible enough to let them step all over her, which in a way was true. But in trying to protect her, he went too far. He tried to control her, and of all the people in the world, she was the one person you couldn’t control, certainly not by force.”
One day Whitey and his wife went on a train ride through the Canadian Rockies with Joe and Marilyn. “It was one of those tourist deals, two railroad cars and a caboose,” said Whitey. “The scenery was breathtaking. At a certain point I said to Marilyn, ‘Do you see those mountains, darling? If you and Joe went to the other side of those mountains and built a cabin and had some kids, you’d both live happily ever after.’ I meant it because I felt Marilyn truly loved Joe, and I didn’t think she felt all that fulfilled by the film business. She didn’t say anything right away. She didn’t want Joe to hear her. But then she leaned over and whispered in my ear. ‘I wish I could, Whitey,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do that. I just can’t.’ ”
Although Monroe and Otto Preminger never resolved their differences, they managed to coexist long enough to complete River of No Return. Years later, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked Preminger if he would ever make another film with Monroe. “No,” he stated emphatically, “I would not—not for any amount of money.” Asked by the same journalist whether she’d ever agree to work with Preminger again, Marilyn responded, “I would, but only if he were the last director left in Hollywood. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t.”
• • •
Joe and Marilyn spent four days in New York in early September before heading back to Los Angeles. Their first night in town, Toots Shor gave a private reception for them in the party room over the tavern. One of the guests was Joe McCarthy, DiMaggio’s manager when he first joined the Yanks. McCarthy told Marilyn, “It’s a pity you never saw Joe play ball. You missed something. He was the best, the absolute best.” The next day the couple attended a ballgame at Yankee Stadium. There they met up with Paul Baer, a friend of Joe’s, and Paul’s brother, Rudy Baer. Born in Milan, Italy, Paul Baer owned a porcelain factory in Lower Manhattan and played golf with DiMaggio whenever the ballplayer happened to visit New York. He’d known DiMaggio since the days of his marriage to Dorothy Arnold. He also knew Joe Jr., who was the same age as his own son.
“I hadn’t met Marilyn Monroe before,” said Paul Baer, “but I can vouch for her beauty. We were seated in the boxes directly behind the Yankee dugout. Rudy and I arrived first. Joe and Marilyn didn’t get there until the third inning. When they walked in, the stadium erupted like a volcano. The pandemonium didn’t cease until Joe and Marilyn both stood and acknowledged the crowd. And then for the duration of the game, many of the Yankee players would stand on the dugout steps facing the crowd for a better view of Marilyn. Not that Joe DiMaggio was exactly a slouch. Here’s a guy who floated across the baseball diamond like a butterfly. One season he struck out only seven times. Can you fathom that? That’s almost as astounding as his fifty-six-consecutive-game hitting streak. Bob Feller, the great Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame pitcher, used to autograph baseballs by signing his name under the phrase ‘I struck out Joe DiMaggio.’ Joe and the blonde made some kind of team. Never mind that Marilyn didn’t seem to understand the finer points of the game. I think she tried to please Joe, but she just couldn’t get into baseball the way he would’ve wanted her to.”
As the game progressed, random kids, mostly young boys, kept drifting over for Joe’s autograph. “Joe was very accommodating,” said Baer. “He was always nice with kids, always patient, always gave them a smile and a pat on the back. His problem in life was that he couldn’t do the same for his own kid. I never understood it. He was wonderful to all his little fans, but on a more personal level, he was the worst father God ever created. And to be honest, Joey Jr.’s mother wasn’t much better.”
While in New York, Joe met with Bernie Kamber. He told Bernie he loved his son and was concerned because Dorothy Arnold had a new man in tow every other week. He felt Joey would be hurt and confused by her carousel of lovers. “I told him,” said Bernie, “Joey would be less confused if he could spend more time with his father. In fact, Joey was in New York at that time visiting with a friend of his from military school. His school didn’t start until mid-September. On their last afternoon in the city, Joe and Marilyn took the boy to Rumpelmayer’s, a fancy pastry shop on Central Park South. Joe was too cheap to buy Joey an ice cream soda. He wanted to go to a regular coffee shop. So Marilyn slipped the kid a twenty-dollar bill. Joe saw the transaction and told Marilyn off. She didn’t know the value of money and so forth. When I heard the story, I took a deep breath. ‘What a pisser!’ I thought.”
Every October Black-Foxe Military Institute sponsored an annual Parents Day, when the parents of students visited the campus and sat in on classes. “Everyone came,” said Joe Jr. “I saw Jerry Lewis and Dorothy Lamour, whose sons attended the academy. Neither my father nor mother ever showed up for that particular event. It bothered me.”
After Marilyn Monroe entered the picture, Dorothy Arnold, perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of jealousy, made a bit of an effort to see her son, even if she didn’t visit him on Parents Day. She and Lillian Millman, her agent’s wife, would occasionally take Joey and George along on overnight trips to Baja California. “My mother had some friends down there,” said Joey, “and at night they’d all go out drinking. My mother would come back roaring drunk. She’d get loud. She’d start singing, telling stupid jokes, and begin flirting with any man who passed her way. Back home in LA, she’d continue to drink. She’d show off, do handstands in front of my friends. But she wouldn’t be wearing any panties. She’d be naked from the waist down. It was humiliating. I couldn’t figure out if my mother was trying in some fashion to compete with Marilyn Monroe. It was ironic. Here was Marilyn, sex symbol of the century, and by comparison to my mother, she seemed demure and innocent. I hate to admit it, but my mother was little more than a tramp.”